1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to image processing. In particular, the invention relates to image processing for enhancing color consistency throughout a document.
2. Related Art
Image input devices such as digital still cameras and scanners, image processing devices such as personal computers, and image output devices such as printers are all in widespread use. Non-professional consumers of such devices now use them to create, process and output documents (digital content) which commonly contain images. Decisions on design features for such digital content, layout, coloration, and so on, are generally made by the consumer/user. An appearance of digital content created by general consumers/users having little expertise in design is likely to lack consistency and have limited aesthetic appeal as compared to content provided by professionals.
To address this problem, techniques for assisting design processing have been developed with the general user in mind so as to facilitate design processing by non-professionals (Refer, for example, to JP-A-7-220101, JP-A-2000-268112, and JP-A-8-55119). JP-A-7-220101 and JP-A-2000-268112 disclose techniques for automatically changing a design of tables in an input document on the basis of an instruction made by a user; while JP-A-8-55119 discloses a technique for automatically performing coloration processing on a document on the basis of an instruction made by a user.
The techniques disclosed in the references above are each designed to carry out design processing on the basis of instructions input by a user. For example, a user may input an instruction to set rules governing a use of coloration in digital content. However, where such content includes, for example, a photograph, it is likely that coloration characteristics set by a use instruction for the content as a whole will not be appropriate for application to the photograph. Consequently, a user inputting an instruction based on known techniques may cause content to be created with coloration characteristics inappropriate for application to the photograph. Further, even if a user makes an input document using various colors appropriate to the user's intention, a document output can be generated according to a predetermined coloration pattern which does not take into account the intention of the user.